


No Reason Why They Can't Be Friends

by kmo



Category: Oklahoma!-Rodgers and Hammerstein
Genre: Angst, Backstory, M/M, Pre-Canon, Villain Protagonist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 12:45:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/597908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kmo/pseuds/kmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Curly didn’t want to be friends, Jud reckoned they was just going to have to be enemies. And no enemy of his was going to take the farm <em>or</em> Laurey without a fight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Reason Why They Can't Be Friends

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Carbon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carbon/gifts).



> Carbon- this is a pairing that never would have occurred to me on my own, but when I read your prompt it made *so* much sense! Strangely enough I played Laurey in my high school production of Oklahoma!- thanks for giving me a chance to revisit a musical that I love. I hope you enjoy the story, I had a lot of fun writing it.

Jud sat on his cot, alone in the dingy smokehouse, cradling his bruised fist. His hand hurt from where he socked the cowboy in the jaw. It should have been a satisfying hurt, giving that smart-aleck rancher’s son a taste of pain, but it weren’t.

His heart hurt, too, in strange places. The farmhand said aloud to the empty room, “It didn’t have to be this way. Not at all.”

 

Jud remembered the first time he met Curly McLain. Boy couldn’t have been more than seventeen, as wet behind the ears as a three-year-old colt. It all started the afternoon Aunt Eller came down to the smokehouse to ask Jud if he wouldn’t mind helping Curly drive the cattle to Tulsa.

“Tex, their head ranch hand done took sick with the fever. An’ Curly’s pa is gettin’ too old to make the trip. Told ‘em as how you used to work in them parts, Jud. Laurey and me will manage fine for a few days on our own now that the crop’s in,” the old woman assured him. And there was money in it, too, more wages than he would make chopping wood and hauling water as her hired hand. Old man McLain wanted to make sure his blue-ribbon cattle got to market on time and that his only son came back safe and sound.

It was all settled, just like that. Two days later he set out with Curly and a couple of younger cowhands, Slim and Fred, all high spirited and such. Aunt Eller’d packed him a hamper of her best ham biscuits, even tossed in a few pieces of that nice rhubarb pie Laurey always made, his favorite. The womenfolk waved ‘em off at the gate. He wanted to laugh at all the fuss they was making, ‘specially Curly’s ma, weeping and dabbing at her eyes as if they was going on some long sea voyage and not a short two or three day ride to Tulsa, of all places. Tulsa was grander than anything these folks knew, but the lost city of El Dorado, it weren’t, last he checked.

They settled in for the ride and Jud got a better look at the McLain boy. He watched Curly (for Jud was always good at watching folks when they didn’t think he was looking), the boy’s wide dark eyes darting this way and that at every little new thing. You could tell he hadn’t seen much of the world, much of the Territory even, past the collection of farms and ranches his people called home. But he sat tall in his saddle, even if his duds did look sparklin’ new, like they been pulled out of the store window that very morning. Oh, he was quick with a smile and quicker with a rope, but Jud at first glance knew him for what he was, a Golden Boy, in spite of whatever calluses he might have earned on his ropin’ hand.

But Curly, (so called Jud s’posed, on account of those soft brown locks of hair that curled over the boy’s collar; he imagined his Christian name was something more like Henry or John), was friendly enough. They weren’t too far gone before he started singing in a rich baritone. At first, Jud wanted to tell him to shut it, he was liable to spook the cattle with all that noise, he was.  But his tone was so soft and sweet, and they didn’t have no other form of entertainment on their long ride to Tulsa, so Jud kept his peace.

Curly finished his song and turned to him, “You got any requests, Jud?”

“Know ‘Aura Lee?’ That’s a purdy one,” he found himself saying.

The boy winked at him and Jud wondered how many misses’ hearts had turned to jelly over a wink like that. Butter wouldn’t melt, now would it? “Course I do.” And the boy opened his mouth and sang all gentle-like, sweet as a lullaby. Sang them all the way till the sun set and they made their camp for the night. They had baked beans ‘round the fire and told tall tales. Jud nursed his whiskey- he’d offered it to the rest of them, but they all declined, as they was Church-goin’ folk. Which was all the same to Jud really, as he didn’t fancy sharing.  Fred and Slim took the first watch, and he and Curly shared the tent together. Jud thanked his stars that Curly wasn’t a snorer.

They passed the rest of the journey to Tulsa in much the same way, rising early, riding hard along the dusty roads, collapsing, exhausted, into a dreamless sleep on their bedrolls at night. Jud wasn’t used to spending so many hours in the saddle and his muscles ached good and sore after but the first day’s ride. Though he didn’t like to let the others see the way he was limping, he caught Curly placing an extra blanket ‘neath his saddle one morning when the other man thought he wasn’t looking. Jud wasn’t sure how to take the cowboy’s kindness, (he certainly wasn’t going to flatter the younger man by saying ‘thank you,’) but he appreciated the blanket all the same.

Wasn’t too long before they saw Tulsa rising from the flat and lonesome prairie. The town seemed larger and finer than Jud remembered. New stores and houses of clapboard and shingle had sprung up like weeds along the thoroughfare. The riders delivered the cattle to the stockyards on time and much to the satisfaction of McLain’s agent. Their business concluded and the cattle on their way to Chicago or Kansas City or some such place, the four young men found themselves at odds and ends for what to do. Curly was all for returning home lickety-split, but the other men wanted to stay and see the sights.

“C’mon Curly. How often boys like us git an afternoon in the big city?” Slim said. 

“Yeah, Curly. What’s the rush?” Fred echoed.

“Alright, I s’pose. Tulsa sure is sumthin’. What you boys wanna do anyways?”

Fred waggled his ginger eyebrows and leaned forward all mischevious-like. “I heard they got a _Burley-Q._ ”

Slim hooted, “Dancin’ gals, wearin’ little more than what beauty God gave ‘em!”

Golden Boy McLain made a sour face. “Why you want to go gawkin’ at painted women like that? T’ain’t decent.”

“That’s the point, cowpoke,” Jud told him, satisfied when Slim grinned.

“What’s wrong? You skeered, Curly?”

The cowboy flushed pink beneath his golden tan. “T’ain’t scared.” He turned to Jud and asked “You know this place?”

“Reckon I do. Shows daily in Murphy’s Saloon.”

“Well lead the way, Jud. Though I’m willin’ to wager two bits these gals t’aint nowhere near as purdy in person as they are in Slim’s dirty mind.”

The company trotted off to the saloon just in time for the afternoon show. Murphy’s did quite a trade this time a year, Jud knew. Was a time he came here often, knew the gals all by name, even had a favorite or two.  Going to the Burley-Q was always a certain thrill, even if it was a familiar one. The knowing that in a matter of moments, the girls would come and flirt and tease, kickin’ up their skirts and flashin’ their garters in a way no respectable farmer’s daughter ever would. Sure enough, Murphy’s gals did not disappoint. Oh, compared to the women in the French postcards Jud had at home, they was almost tame. But all the same, they were as plump and pink and purdy as any red-blooded man could wish for. Certainly seem to have turned the heads of Curly and his two hayseed friends. Fred and Slim couldn’t stop yammering on about who had the bigger bosom, the tall brunette or the freckled one with the strawberry curls.

Curly, however, seemed sullen and quiet, not at all the cheerful cowboy of a few days past. He stayed in that mood, like a cloud hanging over him, and tucked into bed without even so much as saying ‘good night’ to the other fellers. When the time came for Jud to turn in, he noticed the other boy was twistin’ and thrashin’ something horrible in his bedroll.

“Cut it out, won’t ya? You’re like to pull the tent down with all your floppin’ about.”

“Cain’t sleep,” Curly mumbled as he angled his lean frame away from Jud’s.

Jud raised his lantern above the boy’s face and saw how he flushed. Saw a few other things out of the ordinary, too. Well, Curly McLain wouldn’t be the first man nor the last to get all hot and bothered by the gals of Murphy’s Saloon. “That Burley-Q, that’ll give you ideas, that will. Thinkin’ about them gals, plump in all the right places, skin so creamy you just want to just taste it…well that would keep a man up at night, wouldn’t it?’ Jud teased.

The cowboy’s flush deepened. “Don’t know what in the devil you mean.”

Jud flicked his eyes in the direction of Curly’s now tented blanket. “Oh, I think you do.” The farmhand sat down and took a swig from his flask. He passed it to Curly, who swallowed cautiously, only to half-choke on it.

“You could strip paint with that!” Curly said, tears in his eyes.

“Not fer the faint o’ heart, I s’pose,” Jud said with a shrug. “Tell me somethin’- we friends, Curly?”

“Don’t reckon why we cain’t be.”

“ ‘Cause friends, ya see, help each other out.” Jud nodded and placed his large callused hand underneath the blanket right atop the swollen bulge in the other man’s trousers and squeezed ever so gently. Curly’s eyes with their girlish lashes fluttered a bit, but he didn’t cry out or push his hand aside. Jud wondered if the boy really was as squeaky-clean as he pretended to be, so clean he ain’t never done _this_ before. “Gets lonesome…on the farm…on the range, far from womenfolk. It’s good to have friends,” Jud told him, as gently and as kindly as he knew how. He slipped his hand inside the boy’s already unbuttoned trousers to grip his swollen cock. Curly’s eyelids closed and he let out a moan. The boy, so young and untried, wouldn’t last long, ‘specially with those images of half-naked ladies dancing in his head. A few short strokes was all it took.

Jud withdrew his hand and wiped it on his dusty red bandana. Curly’s deep brown eyes, liquid dark as a doe’s, met his in a mixed look of awe and embarrassment. “Thank you…I think,” the boy whispered, too scared perhaps to say anymore. Then he tossed over on his side and blew out the light.

Jud stretched out on his bedroll and sighed. He shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Curly was the selfish type. Them Golden Boys often were.

***

In the next few days, it became clear as daybreak to Jud that his offer of friendship to the other man had been a mistake. Curly was pleasant enough on the trail, joking and singing like to wake the dead as he always was. But he never seemed to sing Jud’s favorite songs anymore, though he was happy to oblige Fred and Slim. And at night, well, maybe it was just Jud’s imagination, but it seemed like Curly inched his bedroll as far away from him as their little tent could allow. By the final day, it seemed Curly had no more to say to Jud than a gruff “g’mornin’ or grumbly “pass the salt.”

And it got so that every little slight bit at Jud like an army of fleas, itching at his pride. ‘Stead of his ration of coffee and biscuits, he drank bitterness and ate resentment. For he had offered Curly his friendship and his aid (‘gainst his better judgment, too!) and the cowboy had paid him back in distrust and denial.

He’d like to pretend it were the first time such a thing had happened.  The broken places inside Jud knew better, and suspected it wouldn’t be the last, neither.

***

Weren’t but two days after they came back from Tulsa, that Curly showed up at Aunt Eller’s place, come a’ courtin’ to Laurey. Oh he _said_ it was ‘cause his ma wanted to borrow the Sears and Roebuck catalog, but Jud could see the way he was sniffing ‘round the girl like a prize swine in rut. Sure, Laurey was sweet and her figure had turned all willowy and womanly in the last year; he’d noticed that himself. And if it were any other man, Jud admitted he wouldn’t a cared two licks about the matter.

But it was in the way that cowboy strutted ‘round the place, cock o’ the walk, sure as shootin’ if he didn’t think Laurey was already as good as his. The farm as good as his, too. The land that he, Jud, had worked and sweat and bled on since Curly was barely out of short pants. And all this coming ‘round to the farm, acting like he was King o’ the Territory, without so much as a “howdy” to Jud, it stuck in his craw, it did. 

Well, if Curly McLain didn’t want to be friends, Jud reckoned they was just going to have to be enemies. And no enemy of his was going to take the farm _or_ Laurey without a fight.

***

Somewhere along the line, the distance ‘tween him and Curly changed over into outright nastiness. Seemed he couldn’t walk around the farm without overhearing Curly’s snide remarks to Laurey about how he’d seen gorillas handsomer than her hired hand. Jud fumed inside, but didn’t say nothin’ on account of he couldn’t risk losing his job. He weren’t no rancher’s son born with a hundred acres and three hundred head a cattle to his name. And it burned him up inside, hotter than a woodstove, every time he saw Laurey toss her head back and laugh at the cowboy’s dumb jokes. He saw what the cowboy was doing, trying to snuff out Jud’s candle to make his own shine brighter. Makin’ him out to be the dark bass fiddle, so Curly could soar with the melody, high and pure like a bugle. Jud didn’t like it, but he didn’t know much how to change it either.

On his way back from town one hot summer’s day, he came upon Curly and the other cowhands in the ole swimmin’ hole. Their young bodies glistened wet in the sunshine, the lines of the farmer’s tans on their necks and arms as sharp as if God himself had drawn it with a ruler. They splashed and horsed around, tossed each other in the air, carefree and wild.

“Hey, Jud, c’mon in! The water’s real nice,” Slim shouted.

“Got to get back to the farm. Aunt Eller’ll get mad if I’m late for dinner,” he said.

Fred splashed water at him. “Aw, the ol’ lady can wait!”

Jud almost smiled, and started a lift a hand to unbutton his work shirt, when Curly drawled back “Better not ask him, Slim. Jud’s so stinky and dirty, he’s liable to poison all the fishes.” The other boys laughed and Jud felt heat flash to his face. Curly kept on, encouraged, “In fact, I’m pretty sure Jud here is allergic to water, on account he never bathes.”

Jud wasn’t much for cleverness and smart-aleck remarks, so he just turned and left, the laughter of the other men ringing in his ears. “Aw, come back, Jud. Cain’t ya take a joke?” Curly called. But Jud didn’t pay him no heed. As he was leavin’, Jud took great satisfaction in grinding Curly’s clean white shirt beneath his dirty boots, covered in mud and dust and Lord knows what else. 

That night Jud had a strange dream. A dark-haired gal, like from one of his postcards, clad in little more than her corset and garters, knelt before him. She teased the length of him with her tongue, took him in her mouth, all warm and soft and wet. He groaned and tangled his hands in her hair, urging her to take him deeper. But suddenly, it wasn’t her long locks, but Curly’s short brown curls beneath his fingers, the cowboy’s sweet pink lips wrapped around him. Half in hate and half in lust, he thrust himself hard into the boy’s throat, till he was like to make the other man gag. But Curly took him in to the hilt and didn’t stop until he had swallowed every last drop of him, a twinkle in his eye the whole time. 

Jud woke with a start, covered in sweat, shocked in the ways his own body and mind had betrayed him.

***

From then on, it seemed Jud couldn’t get no pleasure outta life no matter what he did.  His postcard gals, with their lush figures and wanton looks, left him cold. Even Laurey, purdy and pure as she was, failed to spark him. He took to pacing outside her window at nights, just wishing and hoping and longing to feel _something_ , anything really. Seemed the only thing that pleased him at all was picturing that far off beautiful day when Laurey and the farm were his (for the two were one in the same in Jud’s mind), when he didn’t have to answer to no master but himself. And Laurey, she was kind and sweet, and looked to him all tender-like without a trace of fear. The townsfolk (like that stupid stuck up clerk at the general store that wouldn’t give him credit on account he was a hired hand) would be forced to reckon him an equal. And Curly McLain, not him, would be the one suppin’ on sourness and defeat. Probably be the first time in that boy’s short life that he hadn’t got what he wanted.

But it was best not to think too much about Curly. 

And yet, this dream, too, seemed dimmer by the day. Seemed to fade every time he overheard Laurey sweetly humming a tune Curly had been singing while she did her chores, every time Curly’d come over to the farm and Aunt Eller would welcome him as a favorite son.  More and more, his heart grew dark and angry, while Curly shined ever brighter. And Jud would have been hard pressed to say who he was more angry at- Laurey for giving in to the cowboy’s advances, or Curly for making ‘em in the first place. They two was wrapped up in their own little world, and there was no room for Jud Fry in it.

***

Jud paced about the empty smokehouse. Curly had left with the peddler man not half an hour before. The nerve of that boy, coming in here and telling him he ought to hang himself! And making it out like it was a good idea. And so what if he was stuck in here, as he boy said, “crawlin’ and a festerin’ ”- ain’t like Curly had given him such a warm welcome ‘round the town. Jud was so angry, he thought he could explode. He kicked over the single chair, and ripped the pictures of those empty, smiling cigarette girls from the wall. They weren’t like real women, he knew. Weren’t like real men, neither. Weren’t nothin’ more than the hollow fantasies of a lonely mind.

A knock at the door. “Jud, you in there? ‘S me, Curly, can I come in?”

“Well I’m a guessin’ you’re a gonna come in anyway whether I like it or no.”

The cowboy strode through the door. His dark eyes took in the upturned chair and ripped photographs and he whistled. “Doin’ a little redecoratin’?”

“Say what you come to say, cowboy, ‘fore I change my mind and fill your backside with buckshot,” Jud grumbled at him.

Curly held up his hands in a gesture of truce. One of them had a bottle of whiskey in it. “I’m sorry about what I said before. I had no right to say such things. I ain’t proud of what I said- it was mean and unchristian of me.” He gently righted the wooden chair and set the whiskey down upon its seat. “And I brought you a little peace offerin’- thought you might enjoy a bottle o’ that rotgut paint thinner you like to drink.”

Jud raised a bushy eyebrow. “I’m still takin’ Laurey to the box social. She said she’d come with me and I’m takin’ her. Bottle of whiskey don’t change that.”

“Even so. I’m sorry, Jud,” he told him in a voice that sounded sincere.

Jud gave him a wary nod, then said quietly, “You said once we was friends. ‘Member that? I do.”

Curly’s deep brown eyes met his grey ones. “I do, Jud. I do. I guess I ain’t much acted like one lately, I know.” He took off his Stetson and sheepishly brushed the back of his sunburnt neck. “Don’t know what’s gotten into me. Well, you know how a purdy gal like Laurey can get a man all worked up and such.” Jud shrugged in response. The cowboy looked back at him through his long lashes, a flash of curiosity in his eyes. “Or mebbe you don’t, Jud. Mebbe that’s your problem.”

The next thing Jud knew, he felt his right fist smash into the side of the cowboy’s pretty face. Jud drew back in shock when he’d realized what he done. “Get on outta here, cowboy, and take your whiskey with ya,” he shouted. Curly stared back at him, eyes blazin’, and scrambled out the smokehouse door.

 Jud sat on his bed, alone again. His knuckles were sore and bloody- he’d wondered if he’s managed to break the other man’s nose. Maybe the gals wouldn’t like him so much then. Jud chuckled to himself, and it echoed off the walls of the smokehouse. He raised his fist to his lips and tasted the coppery tang of Curly’s blood. A bloody sort of kiss, that. And not the kind he had wanted at all.

 


End file.
